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Recent Updates

If you haven’t scrolled down lately you may want to check out some recent UPDATES here.

How Many II?

In this post last May (which I encourage you to look at now) I discussed what I described as “an angry, anguished essay” in the Los Angeles Times by Franklin Gilliam Jr. complaining about the disgracefully low numbers of blacks admitted to UCLA. Mr. Gilliam has just come across my post and commented on it, […]

Befuddled Washington Post “Diversity” Editorial

The Washington Post‘s editors are clearly confused. “Only last year,” says their editorial today, the University of Michigan won a landmark battle in the Supreme Court establishing the legitimacy of carefully designed affirmative action programs to ensure diversity in higher education. This year, fresh off that victory, the university experienced a sudden drop in African […]

Inadvertent Comment Deletion

In writing a regular expression to delete some 400+ spam comments that appeared here this evening I made a typo that I didn’t discover until after the first pass, and it looks as though I deleted some not only legitimate but very welcom comments on several posts, including some recent ones. The typo was subsequently […]

The Appeal Of Victimhood

Maybe it’s just me, but I found this story in today’s New York Times both sad and depressing. The lede: An ABC News report about the murder of Matthew Shepard in 1998, which focused national attention on violence against gays, has ignited indignation among gay rights advocates even before its broadcast tonight. The program has […]

Politics, Principle, And Constitutional Interpretation

In the past few days there have been three articles by intelligent and thoughtful liberal commentators who attempt to frame the coming debate over judicial appointments. I find all three very interesting but also troubling to varying degrees. It’s worth reading all of them, for taken together they provide a preview of the positions conservatives […]

Middle Class Black Achievement Gap

Joanne Jacobs has a very good post on this issue. I was going to comment on the articles she links but now don’t need to.

Federal Judge Invalidates Quota Hiring By Boston Police

Boston’s practice of hiring one minority candidate for its police department for every white hired, a practice that flowed from a 1974 consent decree, has been invalidated by U.S. District Judge Patti Saris. Yesterday’s ruling closes a chapter on three decades of affirmative-action hiring practices at the police and fire departments, both of which had […]

The Democrats And “Values”

As Thanksgiving approaches one of the things I’m thankful for is that, despite my perceived apostasy, I have not been abandoned by all of my old liberal friends. One of them, you hardy long-time readers my recall, had strongly recommended a book by George Lakoff, a linguist at Berkeley, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives […]

Hate Crimes

The Washington Post published an article yesterday with the most recent hate crime statistics. The primary findings, though depressing, were not surprising: Racial prejudice, most often directed at black people, was behind more than half the nation’s 7,400 reported hate crime incidents in 2003, the FBI said yesterday. Reports of hate crimes motivated by anti-black […]